How a mobile marketplace is creating a new kind of micropreneur

Mobile task marketplace Spare5 connects big businesses with people looking to earn extra cash in their spare seconds – but there’s a downside

Sharing economy platforms such as Lyft, Fiverr and Task Rabbit are capitalizing on this new breed of worker willing to give rides, pick up someone else’s dry cleaning or even draw a cartoon for as little as a few dollars. Welcome to the gig economy.
Photograph: Dom McKenzie

Blogger Katy Stevens considers herself a modern jack of all trades. In her world, it looks like this: “I make money from a variety of websites, which I then write about on my blog.”

In November, she reported earning £2,000 online (roughly US$3,030) from a variety of paying sources. Stevens uses mobile apps such as GeoTask, which reward users in cash and gift vouchers, in exchange for access to the GPS in their mobile phones. She also participates in affiliate marketing, putting links to Amazon products in her blog that, when clicked on by a reader, translate to a small fee. Earlier this year, Stevens discovered Spare5, an app that lets users complete small tasks on their mobile phones for cash.

Stevens is one of a growing number of self-employed people who make up what’s commonly called the “gig economy”. In the US alone, the self-employed and the workers they hired accounted for 44m jobs in 2014, or 30% of the national workforce, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data the US Census Bureau. Some analysts believe the number could be higher as people may not report the side jobs they pick up.

Sharing economy platforms such as Lyft, Fiverr, Task Rabbit and others have capitalized on this new breed of worker willing to give rides, pick up someone else’s dry cleaning or even draw a cartoon, sometimes for as little as a few dollars.

But startups such as Seattle-based Spare5 are aiming to drill menial tasks down to even tinier increments that can be completed on a mobile device. The pay is commensurate with the size of the task: it’s sometimes as low as a nickel.

For example, users can match photos of similar items – something hard for a computer to do – for $0.15 a pop. Or they can call a business and verify its operating hours for $0.35 a piece. Gather enough of these together during downtime – such as a commute, waiting in line or even going to the bathroom – and instead of falling prey to a social feed, there’s a cash reward. Payment is made through PayPal.

Stevens says that because she’s self-employed and has plenty of free time to complete such tasks, some weeks she’s earned as much as $100; others, not a dime. “I mostly look at any earnings from Spare5 as extra fun money, rather than relying on it for specific bills or anything else,” she says.

Which is how it’s meant to be used, according to Spare5’s CEO Matt Bencke. He insists that the startup, founded in 2014, isn’t meant to be anyone’s full-time job. “Spare5 is the most extreme, modern manifestation of the future of work,” he says.

Bencke argues that Spare5 isn’t part of the gig economy or its cousin, the on-demand economy. “You do it whenever you want,” he says. Spending two minutes productively earning a bit of money on your mobile phone is considerably less challenging than giving strangers rides, he explains. “You download the app [on your iPhone], use your Facebook credentials and take a short survey, and in minutes you’re off to the races.”

Building a bigger business on small tasks

For companies such as Groupon, eBay and others that contract with Spare5, the value proposition is simple: it makes their products easier to find.

Bencke points out that consumers buy products online based on images, yet search engines have difficulty categorizing pictures. When something as simple as a shoe can have as many as 120 characteristics, computers’ artificial intelligence won’t always be able to identify them all, which can hinder the discovery process that would lead to a purchase.

Humans are much better at understanding things like the difference between laces on a shoe and lace edgings on a dress, Bencke explains, and therefore better equipped to tag photos with accuracy. “The best a computer can do is estimate how people in the past have reacted,” he argues. This led to focusing Spare5’s efforts on photos and videos to help e-commerce companies sift through and tag thousands of product shots without placing the burden on their existing employees.

Bencke, a Microsoft veteran who also worked as a senior vice president at the stock photo and film distributor Getty Images, says when he was approached by a friend with the idea for Spare5, he said: “Wow, as a guy curating 110m images a day, I would love that service.”

Getty Images was among the first companies to use Spare5’s “fives”, as those who execute the tasks through the app are called. They created titles and descriptions optimized for search engines for more than 200,000 photos, which Getty claims has resulted in increased traffic and and increased purchases for images that had optimized titles and descriptions.

Another company using Spare5 also reports increases across the board. For Groupon, the online marketplace that offers deals at local businesses in 45 countries, it’s imperative that the most up-to-date operating information is offered to consumers. It had been using employee hours in addition to crowdsourcing such facts through services like Crowdflower, but that wasn’t delivering consistent results.

Spare5’s fivers performing more than 33,000 tasks were able to provide accurate information not available on the web, resulting in an increase in purchases and merchant loyalty. “We have tried several other crowd approaches, but Spare5’s focus on a mobile community of experts has consistently delivered the best results,” Dave Kunst, Groupon Pages director of product and business operations, said in a statement.

Bencke says comparing Spare5 to Crowdflower or Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (which now boasts over 250,000 “human intelligence tasks” for the taking) always makes him cringe. “I don’t consider them competitors,” he says. “We are just different.”

Targeting mobile first is one differentiator, he says, but there’s something else. “I really aspire to build a community,” he contends. He says Spare5 has “tens of thousands” of active users. “It’s better to have a medium sized business where everyone feels respected as an individual,” Bencke says. “There’s a place in the world for both.”

The dark side of no downtime

There might be a problem, however, with selling off small snippets of spare time. While new research on mobile behavior from Nielsen found that people have almost doubled the amount of time they spend on smartphone apps since 2012, it’s not clear that monetizing this behavior is a good thing. Bencke argues that Spare5 is “the ultimate manifestation of how we use our time productively”. But workplace psychologist Karissa Thacker contends that busyness does not equal productivity.

“What is of increasing importance is the ability to manage oneself and one’s time,” Thacker says. If you are taking a break from complex work to dash off a few small tasks on Spare5, it could have the opposite effect.

“The question is whether the busyness is making us more productive or just more tired.”